Music Vision Statement

Intent

At St Francis of Assisi, we believe it is vital to offer all pupils a music curriculum that is broad, diverse and high-quality, which engages and inspires them to develop a life-long love of music, increases their self-confidence, creativity, and imagination, and provides opportunities for self-expression and a sense of personal achievement. We believe that music is an essential learning experience for all pupils that strongly supports pupils’ well-being and well-roundedness. Not only does music promote happiness and excitement, but it develops pupils’ cognitive and processing skills, sense of timing, fine motor skills and listening skills. We believe that music is able to play a crucial role in developing the main drivers of our creative curriculum at St Francis which are at the heart of our ethos – aspiration, innovation, diversity and spirituality – and therefore we value all opportunities for children to discover and revisit key concepts in music through small group work or ensemble. We believe that this helps children to feel part of a community. We organise and collaborate in projects to enable children to share their musical skills at different events both inside and outside of school. 

Implementation

Pupils develop their knowledge, skills and understanding around the following key concepts – performing, composing, transcribing and describing music. These learning hooks underpin learning in each milestone, which enables pupils to reinforce and build upon prior learning, make connections and develop subject specific language through discovery, development and deepening the learning at each stage. We use ‘Charanga’ to learn songs which are directly linked to topics and ‘Into Opera’ for bespoke plans to implement the learning in every year group. We use music and song not only in discrete music lessons but also to support and enrich learning objectives in other lessons. A breadth of music from around the world, for example, is often used to embrace diversity. We also regularly include music for worship and praise throughout the school to develop spirituality, in class and in assemblies.

Impact Through the explicit teaching of the music skills, both the teachers and the pupils assess their learning continuously throughout the lesson. Our assessment systems enable teachers to make informed judgements about the depth of their learning and the progress they have made over time. We plan regular opportunities to listen to pupil voice, view displays and performances and record the learning.